Nothing delights Americans more than when a taco goes too far.

A taco with a shell made out of Doritos? Tacos, you go too far.

A taco with a shell made out of a different kind of Doritos? Tacos, you go further still.

Now Taco Bell is enabling tacos to cavort above their station once more; this time, it's allowing them to be waffles.

Brand Eating was the first to report on the latest chapter in tacos' ongoing evolution into sentient beings, after an Instagram user in Southern California posted a photo of the waffle taco (and its accompanying heraldry). While the waffle taco contains no standard taco ingredients—each wafflaco consists of a waffle, folded around a sausage patty, folded around some scrambled eggs—and is therefore not a taco in the "classic" sense, the resulting pocket of food is certainly shaped like a taco.

It's a taco in the sense that a loose leaf binder full of papers is a taco. It's a taco in the sense that your cupped palm holding a marble is a taco.

During this test run, the wacka flocko is retailing for $0.89, a price so cheap it's almost like you are saving money by buying it (you are not; you are spending $0.89). Food Beast notes that it is served with a shot of syrup and sold only until 11 a.m.

While the item is currently only available in select California locations, Taco Bell is already trying to make it happen. And being weirdly hostile about it.

@joeyjeff Google it. #WaffleTaco

— Taco Bell (@TacoBell) May 12, 2013

Tacos, you go too far.

[Images via AP / Sarah1ch5]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

It must be said right up front: coffee is a utilitarian beverage that exists mainly to wake you up. Therefore, treating coffee as some delicate wine-like treat that can only be appreciated by a select group of gourmands is absurd. Or is it?

It is. It really is. Imagine, if you will, a 25 year-old professional barista sidling up to, say, a middle-aged construction worker on his way to work at 6 a.m.—a construction worker who has been drinking coffee for longer than said barista has been alive, and who actually needs the coffee for a physical purpose. And imagine that barista looking that construction worker dead in the face and telling him, "You don't understand coffee. You don't appreciate coffee."

I submit to you that any whippersnapper who could truly feel comfortable saying such a thing is a profound asshole.

I also submit to you that the difference between the world's most expensive cup of coffee and a cup of Folger's that I make in the morning in my shitty drip coffee machine is really not that much, when you get right down to it. They both taste like coffee. Maybe the good coffee is 20% better tasting than the average coffee. Fine. That's not a respectable margin upon which to base an entire lifestyle.

I believe these things to be true. And I drink enough coffee that I will enthusiastically argue these points with anyone, until I run out of coffee. Still... you hang around a god damn place like New York City long enough, with all its prosperous coffee bars and roasting operations and tastings and cuppings and staggeringly credulous news stories, and you wonder, hey, with all this ruckus, might these off-putting and obsessed coffee snobs be onto something?

“When the morning shift comes in at 5:30 a.m., they’ll cup the coffees,” said Mr. Morrissey, who won the prestigious World Barista Championship when he was working for Square Mile Coffee Roasters. “Then they’ll pick how to make it. It’s not that one brewer is better than another brewer. It’s that they might decide, ‘I’m loving the toffee notes in this, I bet it’ll be awesome in a Cafe Solo,’ ” he said, referring to a kind of brewer...

“Sometimes you want a heftier cup,” Mr. Morrissey said. “Other times you may want to celebrate other characteristics of the coffee, the more floral notes, the delicate acidity.”

Mmm... no. If I sat around all morning meditating upon the feel of one pair of socks on my feet versus the feel of another pair of socks on my feet, I'd have some flowery things to say about socks, too. But from a more reasonable perspective, I'd still be wasting my life, meditating upon a single mundane and rather superfluous item. "Yeah, he's a sock guy. He's really into socks. Knows tons of sock trivia," people would say, politely. "We're really trying to find him a date. Do you know anyone? No?"

I'm sure the coffee is good and all though.

[NYT. Photo: Kevin Tao/ Flickr]

It’s been one week since Cleveland dishwasher Charles Ramsey was at home eating a Big Mac when he heard a woman's scream and immediately began a viral transformation from unsuspecting neighbor to true-crime hero to backlash target to trend-story subject to bemused celebrity. And seven days later, his face is now permanently inked on the back of some dude's leg.

Rodney Rose, an artist at Cleveland shop 252 Tattoo, posted a Facebook message offering a free Charles Ramsey portrait. His friend, Stephen Munhollon, took him up on the gift, telling Cleveland's FOX affliliate:

“I think Rodney and I were caught up in the ridiculousness of it,” said Munhollon. “You could ask the question, did I want to get Charles Ramsey tattooed on my leg, and the obvious answer is no. The real question is, was I willing to get Charles Ramsey tattooed on my leg, and the answer was yes.”

Ah, the "ridiculousness" of a black man whose lively local-news interview about a rapist went viral. Sounds familiar. But please, sir, continue:

Munhollon said he’s gotten stopped several times already about the tattoo, and people have even requested to have their photos taken next to it.

“People even around here loved it because everyone knows who this guy is now,” said Rose. “I wasn’t sure if people would think it was Jimi Hendrix or Bob Marley, but everyone knew right away it was Charles Ramsey.”

That is because your fellow Ohioans can distinguish the nuances of black faces, though if we got tattoos of you, people might think they were the Rasta Banana-Winning, Life Savings-Losing Guy, if you really want to reduce all humans to the point of flat, offensive similarity.

But hey, nice, sharable tattoo!

[Cleveland's FOX affiliate // photo via Facebook]

To contact the author of this post, email camille@gawker.com.

Minnesota’s state Senate just voted 37-30 to legalize gay marriage, making it the twelfth state (second in the Midwest) to do so. The bill will take effect August 1, which is a Thursday, so everyone keep that weekend free.

You don't know Roger Dickey's name, but you know his creation: Mafia Wars, that incredibly popular, spammy hybrid of virus and videogame once played by millions, that polluted your Facebook feed some years back. Now, he's got a new project on the way—a vague "dating coach" service—and it's already annoying people: its own employees.

It's not clear what DateCoach is, beyond another attempt at mixing the online dating technologist with an old school yenta human touch. As far as I can tell, the site will (someday) give you what amounts to tech support for sex, a "coach" that will help you talk with other humans.

It sort of worked for Tawkify, so, alright, why not try to do it too? We live in a time when cloning another company is a perfectly acceptable business model. Still, it's all pretty ho-hum, which is exactly why the secret startup needs to bombard its unpaid employees with manic emails like these, leaked to us by one of the potential "date coaches." Give them a reason to keep believing, a reason to think this site might turn into something more than an unpaid gig you might find trawling Craigslist. Which is exactly what it is:

I answered on ad on craigslist which led to what was maybe a 7 minute phone conversation with [DateCoach manager] Amber [Hogan]. My relationship with DateCoach so far has been entirely based on getting these emails. I have yet to even see the test sites Amber writes about.

Without any track record as a matchmaker (our source says DateCoach is just looking for "'fun personalities' including 'bartenders'") or commitment to the company, she found herself stuck in an unrelenting internal email chain. No pay, no contract, no helpful direction, no real information of any kind—just a barrage of saccharine memos and boosterism, straight from the managerial hive mind. These are just a sample of Amber Hogan's pre-launch spirit fingers, combining the motivational methods of Michael Scott and a punch bowl filled with amphetamines.

"With so much elation" really sums it up. So, so much elation, despite a slipping launch date and a nebulous site to launch.

Hiring is an interesting thing at DateCoach, we're told: "There has been no payment and I haven't filled out a w-4 or anything. I've been told by email that I am an 'employee' but there is really nothing official about it."

"I am telling the press that everyone on the site has some sort of online dating experience."

BIRTHDAYS! But what about the actual company? She promises it'll all make sense... eventually. But for now, here are some pictures:

The emails don't stop.

Another launch date promised:

Thanks for being "uber patient," but the debut misses again. "Respond to this email letting me know that you are still with the datecoach team."

Our source doesn't know if this latest date will stick—and she doesn't really seem to care, at this point. "I have my doubts that it will launch or, if it does, that it will be successful." But she can at least have faith in the unending stream of optimism, against all odds, dollars, or merit. That's the startup way. Keep hustling. Keep hacking. Never give up, no matter how much you probably should. With so much elation—that grinning hope that undergirds so much of the startup economy.

Image by Devin Rochford

The Associated Press found itself in an interesting predicament today when it was forced to report that the Justice Department surreptitiously obtained two months of its own employees' phone records.

The records obtained by the government came from more than 20 different lines throughout April and May of last year. They detailed incoming and outgoing calls and call durations for AP staffers' work phones, general AP office numbers in New York, DC, and Hartford, Connecticut, and the number for AP journalists in the House of Representatives press gallery. Even information about people's personal phone lines were collected.

In a "letter of protest" to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt called the seizure a "massive and unprecedented intrusion." He continued:

There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.

Though the government did not explain why it obtained the phone records in a letter it sent to the AP Friday, the inquiry may be connected to a federal investigation into a May 7, 2012 AP story about a failed al-Qaeda attack. That article contained details about an anti-terrorist CIA operation in Yemen, and the government has since been attempting to hunt down the CIA leak.

In February, CIA Director John Brennan, who was then just a nominee for the position, revealed that the FBI had once asked him if he was the AP's source for the story, something he denies. Brennan went on to call the leak "unauthorized and dangerous."

According to the AP, "Justice Department published rules require that subpoenas of records from news organizations must be personally approved by the attorney general but it was not known if that happened in this case." Other Justice Department requirements say media subpoenas should be "as narrowly drawn as possible" and "directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period." Of course, when you're an extremely powerful government entity secretly gathering information about journalists, the definitions of words like "narrowly" and "reasonably" can usually be manipulated to fit your purposes.

One particularly interesting question as we watch the fallout from all of this is how politicians and their employees will feel knowing that the Justice Department is monitoring their conversations with reporters, many of which are no doubt "off the record." As it turns out, they're always on somebody's record.

A high-ranking newsroom official for Bloomberg News was ordered last year to cut off reporters' access to information about how clients used the company's information terminals, according to a former Bloomberg reporter, but the spying continued anyway. The order followed complaints from JPMorgan Chase that Bloomberg reporters had used JPMorgan's terminal-use records to break stories about the "London Whale” trading debacle, which led to more than $6 billion in losses for the company.

At the time, Bloomberg anchor Erik Shatzker had openly commented on-air about using terminal data to track subjects in the story, as Buzzfeed reported Saturday. But unlike Bloomberg's surveillance of Goldman Sachs, which blew up into a scandal last week, the JPMorgan episode passed quietly.

"JPMChase raised it with Bloomberg," the former reporter wrote to Gawker, "but unlike Goldman, did not make a big deal out of it. (They had other problems at the time[.])"

A JPMorgan source clarified that the bank never lodged a formal complaint with Bloomberg’s business side at the time. Rather, they complained to the reporters directly. The source said that for the past year, Bloomberg News journalists had been “very openly telling us how often someone had logged in, and trying to track disciplinary actions based on that.”

“They would call us and say Bruno [Iskil, the so-called “London Whale”] hasn’t logged in and a few days.” It wasn’t just regarding the chief investment office, the unit responsible for the disastrous trades. Reporters were also tipped off to potential departures in JPMorgan’s fixed income and equity divisions by tracking the last time an executive logged in.

According to the JPMorgan source, the response from reporters was that they were “allowed to do that.” Only after the news broke Friday did JPMorgan realize reporters had enjoyed access to data beyond just whether someone logged into the terminal.

The former Bloomberg reporter, who requested anonymity, said that some executive editors had condoned the use of clients' terminal data as part of the reporting process, driven by editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! directive." It "was ongoing for a long time," the source wrote. "Some people there frowned on it, others thought it was needed to keep Winkler happy."

The order to cut off the terminal access came from an unknown higher-up authority, according to the ex-reporter, and was given to Bloomberg News chief of staff Reto Gregori. Gregori, the source wrote, "was supposed to take care of it and he fucked up. He fucked up by not taking care of it once it was brought to his (and Winkler's) attention."

Bloomberg reporters had also used terminal data, the ex-reporter said, to discover that former UBS trader Kweku M. Adoboli—who was sentenced to seven years in prison last year for fraud that prompted a multibillion trading loss—had left UBS.

Another source familiar with Bloomberg News said that Winkler himself would encourage reporters to use the function on the terminal to see when certain senior executives were frequently checking job listings.

“This practice was not new at all and I am surprised it took this long for an issue to be raised,” a former Bloomberg News editor told Gawker.

The ex-reporter called Bloomberg's official response to the Goldman Sachs controversy "crafty," for implying that executives had cut off the spying as soon as they'd become aware of any customer complaint. And one part of the statement from Bloomberg LP CEO Dan Doctoroff, a deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg, was particularly misleading, the source said: "Doctoroff claimed that reporters were unable to see which news stories clients read. It's true that a reporter couldn't go through a client's profile to check an individual's reading list."

"BUT," the source added, "the 2 function allows editors to look at a particular story and see how many people, and who read or emailed it. So you couldn't search to see what Steve Cohen read, but you could pick a story and see who read it."

Neither Bloomberg News nor Gregori returned request for comment.

Update 7.12pm: Bloomberg News spokesperson Ty Trippet said that the order to cut off reporter access was made after Erik Shatzker mentioned the practice on on-air. But Trippet placed the responsibility with the business side, rather than with Bloomberg News' chief-of-staff:

Reto Gregori was not responsible for making this change. Executives on the business side were asked to change reporter access but the request fell through the cracks.

Trippet later added: "Bloomberg has no record of a complaint from JPMorgan on this issue."

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

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It's quaint how people still manage to get outraged about surveillance. You are being monitored, right now, just like everybody else with a phone or a computer or a bank account or a pressure cooker, because Total Information Awareness is real. ‘Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not." Who said that, maybe Alex Jones?

No, it was former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente, in a prime-time interview on CNN about the Boston Marathon bombers. Clemente made an offhand admission that government prosecutors could get recordings of past phone calls from or to anyone.

CNN hostess Erin Burnett, usually a reliable law-and-order stooge, suddenly sounded like an Occupy Wall Streeter:

"So they can actually get that? People are saying, 'Look, that is incredible.'"

Associated Press reporters were spied upon after breaking an embarrassing story about a CIA operation in Yemen. Bloomberg reporters helped themselves to supposedly private information about wealthy and powerful Bloomberg customers. IRS agents investigated new non-profits with names that sounded like Republican campaign groups.

Today's scandals are only scandals because we have yet to acknowledge that we carry tracking beacons wherever we go—whether a smart phone or Google Glass or inside our car's navigation system—and that all of our communications are collected and saved, just in case. Some of it is given voluntarily, like the Tea Party groups self-declaring as tax-deductible non-profits, and some of it is collected by everything from traffic cameras keeping timestamped license plate numbers to Apple or Google keeping years worth of location data collected as you go from home to work to liquor store to strip club to home again.

You know how a 100MB hard drive was a pretty big deal a decade ago, and today for that price you can buy a couple of extra terabytes just to be safe with your porn collection or family photos? The government gets even better prices for data storage.

National and local governments, credit bureaus, foreign governments, Web services, utility companies, cell providers, supermarkets, Web retailers, insurance groups, banks and ATMs, shipping services, airlines and Disneyland are some of the data collectors with files on you, right now. Of course they're not physical files, in most cases. They're just data, copied and backed up and archived all over the world and probably in space, too.

The logo for the Total Information Awareness Office shows a pyramid orbiting the Earth with its All Seeing Eye gazing over the Arab world. When people freaked out about that logo in the Patriot Act days, it was more about the creepy Big Brother concept rather than fear that all this potentially incriminating data might even be preserved off-world. But it probably is. Most American space missions are classified. There's a robot space shuttle replacement that flies for months and months at a time, and you can't get anyone in the American government to say what it's doing up there. An entire town has sprung up in the Utah desert to monitor and store data tracking the lives of Americans. Not far away, the private backup company Mozy has its own underground city. Maybe you use the service. It's very convenient.

All the Big Brother stuff you've been hearing about and fretting about or possibly dismissing as no big deal, it's all real. It's operational. The phone companies opened their data spigots to America's domestic and (supposedly) foreign intelligence agencies after 9/11. Email, Google searches and Web history are all available to law enforcement. New regulations pushed by Eric Holder last year would let the government legally keep all information on all Americans for five years, regardless of any suspicion of terrorism or criminal activity. And by the time they're asking permission to do something, they've already got it mastered.

For now, it's still too much to detain anyone who might potentially commit a crime because humans still have to do the rounding up and arresting and trials and sentences. But just as drones have proven far more effective than high-school dropout soldiers who are homesick and traumatized, robocops will shortly be handling the detaining part of police work.

Is that nuts? Ask your local police force's bomb robot. It won't answer, because it doesn't care. It was made to safely destroy threatening packages, not to talk to you about how life is so weird it's like a Philip K. Dick story, etc.

[Photo via Getty Images.]

"Of the 41 percent of Republicans who consider Benghazi to be the worst political scandal in American history, 39 percent are unaware that Benghazi is located in Libya. 10 percent said it's in Egypt, 9 percent in Iran, 6 percent in Cuba, 5 percent in Syria, 4 percent in Iraq, and 1 percent in North Korea and Liberia."

Dr. Joyce Brothers, the celebrity psychologist who came to pop-culture prominence in the late 1950s, died today in New York City. She was 85.

The mummified remains of a Chicana author, activist, and teacher were found inside her Santa Fe, New Mexico home last week. Authorities and family members believe the body of Barbara Salinas-Norman may have been inside the home for over a year.

At one time Salinas was a prominent children's author. She wrote and published stories – through Pinata Publications, which she founded – designed to help Mexican American children identify with their culture. As she told The Miami News in 1998:

“The books in Spanish came from Spain, and the children in them looked European.” And, she added, “Here we were, eating beans in Frito Bandito land. We were never pictured as attractive people, only as short and fat.”

She also worked as a bilingual teacher in Oakland.

In recent years, however, Salinas had become reclusive and suffered from financial problems.

She became “pretty much homeless,” according to her friend Peggy Trujillo. She sometimes slept in her car in the Sam's Club parking lot because, she told Trujillo, mice would crawl over her when she slept at home. Trujillo hadn't seen her since the end of 2011.

Salinas' body was discovered by her brother-in-law, Louis Ponce, who told the New Mexican that he'd visited the home determined to “find her no matter what” because it'd been such a long time – over two years — since he had last heard from her.

When he entered the home, which was filled with an odor that Ponce described as “awful,” he found her mummified remains near a poster that parodied Rosie the Riveter.

This version shows Rosie as a skeleton, with a red cloth on her head and her arm raised in a fist under the caption, “Sí, Se Muere!” Yes, we die.

Once Ponce spotted the body, he panicked. “I ran like hell,” he told the New Mexican.

“If you saw the apartment, you would never walk inside it,” he said. “I never knew anybody could be that filthy.”

There was, according to Ponce, debris everywhere, as if Salinas had been a hoarder. Ponce said there'd been similar messes at her previous residences, from which he'd helped her move. “It’s been this way for the last 10 years,” he said.

A preliminary autopsy revealed that Salinas likely died of natural causes.

[Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com

Big day for heroic firefighters: In Georgia, firefighters received an award from PETA for rescuing ducklings from a storm drain. Meanwhile, in New York City, the FDNY had to rescue an NYPD officer and a cat stuck 30 feet up in a tree.

A driver was arrested and charged with DUI after taking a group of students on a terrifying ride to their prom. The 23 high school students first noticed something was off when Richard L. Madison, 54, was over half an hour late picking them up. Their suspicions were confirmed once Madison reportedly drove into a ditch, across several lanes of traffic, and over two medians.

"I had a feeling he was drunk when we first went into the ditch,” observant student Kelsey Dano told CBS Chicago. "He hopped over a median and cut off 3 cars and then...he took us to the wrong hotel, he took us to the Hyatt hotel instead of Abbington Place so we had 5 more miles to go," she added, to My Fox Chicago.

Several concerned students called their parents, who notified school police and school authorities. When Madison emerged from the bus – “stumbling and his eyes were really red,” according to Dano – he was immediately arrested and charged with misdemeanor charges of DUI and reckless conduct.

Madison, who definitely understands how bail works, denies any wrongdoing.

"You know, if I was guilty, I would still be in jail," said Madison, who authorities said posted bail on Saturday night. "That's my thought. I would not be at home right now.”

The Russian spacecraft carrying Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and two others has landed safely in Kazakhstan. While in orbit Hadfield became an internet sensation, most recently for his amazing cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."

On Saturday, drivers in Charlotte, North Carolina encountered an unusual sight alongside Providence Road: a family of four, led by their grandmother, was walking along the road, entirely naked.

“Like freshly-born baby naked,” Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Capt. Rod Farley told the Charlotte Observer. “This was Adam and Eve stuff, not even a loincloth.”

Another witness, Charlotte resident Jill Mead, told the paper that the sight “blew [her] mind.”

Police eventually stopped the family – the grandmother, her daughter, one toddler and one infant – and took all four to a nearby hospital, where the two adults underwent physical and mental evaluations.

“It didn’t appear that they had any problems short of that they didn’t have any clothes on,” Farley said.

As for the inspiration for their public nudity, the women gave as good a reason as any: Farley said they told police, “the Lord told them to get naked and walk down the street."

[via NY Daily News]

Angelina Jolie writes in a stunning op-ed that she recently underwent the surgery after learning she carries a mutant form of a gene that predisposes her for breast and ovarian cancer.

She writes in the New York Times:

I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

She wrote the op-ed in hopes of inspiring and informing other women:

But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.

She says her chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent, and that although the decision to have a double mastectomy was not an easy one, she did it for her children. Having lost her own beloved mother to the disease, she says "I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer."

[NY Times]

Image via Getty

Russia's Federal Security Service has detained an American citizen who is being accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer to work for the CIA.

Ryan Fogle, who was working at the American Embassy, was an undercover CIA operative, who, according to the Russians, was carrying a great deal of money. He was also found with a letter filled with instructions for the Russian he was trying to flip to the CIA.

The U.S. Embassy has yet to comment on the situation.

The Russians claim that Fogle also was in possession "special technical equipment" and the "means for changing one's appearance" (pictured below). He was detained Monday night and then handed over to U.S. officials Tuesday morning.

[Photos RT]

Despite "falling in love" with Detroit while filming a movie here, Ryan Gosling is not running for mayor of our troubled city, thus meaning residents will have to endure another four years of decidedly un-handsome leadership.

Gosling is in town with Eva Mendes filming "To Catch a Monster" and his sightings around town have been well-documented by Detroit residents who had never seen a celebrity before ever.

Because no famous person had ever visited Detroit since the city's inception in 1701, there was speculation that Gosling might lend his star power to political office, playing off of residents' long-held tendency to vote for people on name recognition alone.

As the window closes today for mayoral candidates to file petitions to run, however, Gosling's name was not on the list.

Gosling's absence won't mean the race won't be interesting. Detroit could have its first woman mayor or, much to the delight of Detroit News columnists who don't live in the city, its first white mayor in more than 40 years.

In alphabetical order as it always should be, Detroit's mayoral candidates include accountant and four-time candidate Tom Barrow; former Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan; State Rep. Fred Durhal; CPA and former State Rep. Lisa Howze; Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon; State Rep. John Olumba; and community volunteer Jean Vortkamp.

Current Mayor Dave Bing announced he would not be running and may be running for Wayne County Executive. Or maybe not. Who ever knows with that guy?

For years, doctors have advised people to limit their daily salt intake to 1,500 milligrams in order to protect their hearts. Now, other doctors say that keeping your salt intake that low will hurt your heart. What we can say for sure: salt, heart.

As Gina Kolata (who is often wrong about things!) reports in the NYT, a new government health report has found that following the longstanding dietary guidelines on salt consumption may, in fact, kill you. You would no doubt die regretting all of the good food you'd forsaken in order to limit your salt intake.

“As you go below the 2,300 [mg per day of salt] mark, there is an absence of data in terms of benefit and there begin to be suggestions in subgroup populations about potential harms,” said Dr. Brian L. Strom, chairman of the committee and a professor of public health at the University of Pennsylvania. He explained that the possible harms included increased rates of heart attacks and an increased risk of death.

Other medical groups, dead-enders like the American Heart Association, are standing by their low salt intake recommendations. Although this new evidence in favor of more salt sounds rather compelling. So should you aim for more salt? Less salt? Who can you trust?

The good news is that this entire discussion is academic, because the average American eats so much salt per day that everyone agrees it will kill them.

[NYT. Photo: Karyn Christner/ Flickr]